Northeastern to celebrate National Engineers Week

In this file photo, Ed Han, E’19, Jake Cardinal, E’18, and Eshan Keyvani, E’19, calibrate an airflow system during a class in the Transport lab. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University

Northeastern University’s College of Engineering will host a weeklong series of events and activities in celebration of National Engineers Week, an annual tradition honoring the many contributions engineers have made to the world.

The program—which will run until Friday, Feb. 24—will include workshops in 3D printing, lectures from distinguished speakers in cutting-edge research fields, and tours of the new Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex.

It is free and open to the public, including budding engineers in K-12.

Here’s a rundown of upcoming events:

Meet the Wireless Club

Program attendees will have the opportunity to meet the students behind Northeastern’s Wireless Club on Tuesday, Feb. 21 from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. in 9 Hayden Hall. The club is focused on amateur radio, with a particular emphasis on circuit design and debugging.

Robotics open house

Students in Northeastern’s Field Robotics Group will showcase their autonomous car on Tuesday, Feb. 21 from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. in the Raytheon Amphitheater.

The group’s robots have been deployed to Greenland, Antarctica, and many places in between, where students have used them to conduct sea ice studies and build algorithms for cars driving in rain and snow.

Cybersecurity

Robert Cunningham, of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, will deliver a lecture titled “Designing and Developing Cyber-resilient Systems” on Tuesday, Feb. 21 at 5 p.m. in the Raytheon Amphitheater. His talk will focus on his efforts to protect data against remote and local attackers, enabling some portion of functionality to continue even when a successful attack occurs.

Product development and venture creation

The Michael J. and Ann Sherman Center for Engineering Entrepreneurship Education will host an information session on Wednesday, Feb. 22 from 11:45 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. for those interested in product development and venture creation.

The 90-minute event will be divided into two parts. The first part will feature professor Shashi Murthy, the center’s founding director, who will explain the ins and outs of Northeastern’s entrepreneurial engineering minor. The second part will focus on the center’s unique experiential learning opportunities, with Abbey Titcomb, E’18, the founder of Knightly, and Tuan Ho, E’18, the founder of ScholarJet, reflecting on their opportunities to work on their ventures while on co-op at the center.

Drug delivery

Paula Hammond, the David H. Koch Chair Professor of Engineering at MIT, will deliver a lecture titled “Nanolayers for Drug Delivery: From Cancer to Wound Healing” on Wednesday, Feb. 22 at noon in the Raytheon Amphitheater.

Hammond’s research in nanotechnology encompasses the development of new biomaterials to enable drug delivery from surfaces with spatial and temporal control, with a particular focus on investigating novel responsive polymers for targeted nanoparticle drug and gene delivery.

Games, activities, and trivia

Enjoy liquid nitrogen ice cream while applying chemical engineering principles to make your own toothpaste, silly putty, and lava lamps on Wednesday, Feb. 22 from 2 to 4 p.m. in 440 Egan Research Center.

After you’ve learned a thing or two, test your chemical engineering knowledge in a trivia contest from 5 to 6 p.m. in the Raytheon Amphitheater.

Technology rebels

Bilal Zuberi, a partner at Lux Capital, will deliver a lecture titled “Technology Rebels: Starting Revolutions that Shape our Future” on Wednesday, Feb. 22 at 7:30 p.m. in the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex auditorium.

Zuberi will describe how unconventional thinking has shaped revolutions in fields ranging from medicine to manufacturing and how the same process is guiding the next generation of startups and multibillion-dollar ideas.

ISEC tours

The Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex is an architectural marvel—a six-story, 220,000 square-foot structure designed to foster interdisciplinary research and collaboration.

For those who have yet to explore the complex, tours of the building will be held on Thursday, Feb. 23 from 9 a.m. to noon. Beginning inside ISEC’s front entrance, the tour will visit lab spaces, teaching laboratories, and the 280-seat auditorium. It will also enable participants to engage in a Q&A with building management.

Interactive engineering open house

The First Year Engineering Learning and Innovation Center and the Department of Bioengineering will host an interactive open house on Thursday, Feb. 23 from noon to 3 p.m. in the Snell Engineering Center.

The three-hour event will include 3D printing demonstrations, Arduino robot wrestling matches, and biomechanics measurements with a force plate and inertia measurement sensors.

Performance-based earthquake engineering

Greg Deierlein, the John A. Blume Professor of Engineering at Stanford University, will deliver a lecture titled “From Performance-Based Engineering to Earthquake Resilience” on Thursday, Feb. 22 at 5:30 p.m. in the Raytheon Amphitheater.

His talk will focus on how performance‐based earthquake engineering has matured over the past 20 years from a conceptual framework into a formal methodology that can enable quantitative assessment of the seismic risks to buildings and infrastructure.

Dream big at the engineering expo

All aspiring scientists, engineers, and inventors are invited to Northeastern’s Engineering Expo, which will be held on Friday, Feb. 24 from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the Curry Student Center.

Activities, experiments, and demonstrations will be led by representatives from a variety of the university’s engineering clubs and organizations, including the Nutrons, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and Graduate Women in Science and Engineering.

Engineering leadership

Bryan Fontaine, an executive vice president for Bose Corporation, will deliver a lecture titled “Engineering Leadership” on Friday, Feb. 24 at 2 p.m. in 106 West Village G.

Under Fontaine’s leadership, Bose has designed several strategic initiatives to bring value to the company, including the implementation of mentoring programs and Lean Six Sigma.

3D printing

The final event in the weeklong program—a lecture on 3D printing by Rebecca Knepple, a member of the Artisan’s Asylum, a makerspace in Somerville, Massachusetts—will be held on Friday, February 24 at 4 p.m. in 106 West Village G.

Knepple will explain pre- and post-processing techniques for 3D printing as well as best practices for people new to the technique. She will also discuss maker- spaces, the opportunities they provide, and how participants can get involved in one.